Category Archives: Risks of climate change

Even if we don’t know if the magnitude is large, can we afford to be wrong?

Citigroup climate risk study part 2 – stranded assets

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The CitiGPS study makes a unique contribution to the climate change risk literature: reducing GHG emissions will lead to stranded investment assets. These assets include both fossil fuel holdings and the equipment that uses those fuels. Protecting those investments is at the heart of much of the resistance to addressing climate change risk.  Removing political barriers is probably the single greatest difficultly in moving to implement policies to mitigate this risk; many policy proposals are at the ready so there’s no lack there. Given the apparent urgency of acting, perhaps it’s time to ask the question whether these asset owners should be compensated by those who will benefit directly, i.e., the rest of us? 

What’s behind the reluctance of political actors to propose this type of solution is the belief in the underlying premise of benefit-cost analysis. Economists have unfortunately perpetuated a misconception on the public that so long as total societal benefits exceed costs, a policy is justified even if those suffering those costs are not compensated for their losses. The basis of this is the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency criterion. In contrast, market transactions are presumed to only occur if both parties gain through Pareto efficiency--one party fully compensates the other one for the transaction. Public policy now casts aside this compensation requirement. Unfortunately this leads to significant redistribution impacts that are too often left unexamined. And of course, the losers resist these policies, with a ferocity that is accentuated by both loss aversion (where potential losses are felt more strongly than gains) and that these losses are usually concentrated among a smaller group of individuals than the spread of the benefits.

Too often public agencies are running over these interests to push for societal benefits without compensating the losers. A recent example that I was involved with was the adoption by the California Air Resources Board of the in-use off-road diesel engine regulations. CARB mandated the premature scrappage of construction equipment that had been purchased to comply with previous regulatory mandates from CARB and the US EPA. CARB claimed societal air quality benefits of $13 billion at the cost of $3 billion to the construction industry. Yet CARB never proposed to pay the owners of the equipment for their lost investments. GHG regulation is proceeding down the same path.

If the benefits truly justify adopting a policy, and GHG reductions certainly appear to meet that criterion, then society should be willing to compensate those who made investments under the previous policy environment that endorsed those investments. Certainly there’s questions about whether those investors truly had property rights in the resources they used, but that issue should be addressed directly, not as an implicit assumption that no such property rights ever existed. (This question about property rights has been raised in regulating California’s water use.) Too often policy proponents conflate a goal of an improved environment with goals to redistribute wealth. By jumping over the property rights question, wealth also can be redistributed implicitly. Societal equity issues are important, but they shouldn’t be achieved through backdoor measures that make all of us worse off. Requiring politicians and bureaucrats to consider the actual cost of their policy proposals will make us all better off, and maybe even remove obstacles to a better environment.

Citigroup publishes favorable study on addressing climate change risk

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Citi GPS: Global Perspectives & Solutions released a study on the potential risks of climate and the costs to act to mitigate that risk. It will be interesting to see if Citigroup acts decisively on this to put its corporate heft behind changing national reluctance and policies on addressing climate change.

Differing views of the future? High speed rail vs electric vehicles

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As I was driving back from Los Angeles to Davis, I thought about how convenient it would be to turn on an auto pilot that allowed us to lock into the train of cars up Highway 99. The only reason I really had to pay attention was due to the varying speeds of the traffic. But that future may be nearer than we might think. Google’s self-driving car is getting most of the press, but in fact there are many similar technologies already on the road. In fact, there’s been some concern that drivers are already pushing the limits on current controls, but collision avoidance devices may soon be standard equipment.

Which brings us to the question: How will high speed rail fare in a world with driverless electric cars? The high speed rail travel forecast appears to assume a similar mix of gasoline-fueled automobiles; in fact, the word “electric” isn’t even in the report. On the other hand, studies show that EV market share probably needs to reach 45% by 2030 to achieve an 80% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050. And the Air Resources Board is considering regulations to implement “fast refueling / battery exchange” that would make the LA-SF trip even easier in an EV. Given the shorter life of automobiles, we might expect that almost all of the highway trips are with EVs by 2045.

We’re left with the question of what are the true emission reductions from HSR in such a world? Are we building a project that’s truly useful life is less than a decade?

Decoupling of economic and electricity demand growth

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After posting a dire report about the lack of cost-effectiveness for energy efficiency, I came across this more encouraging graphic. It shows that as national economies become wealthier, the electricity consumption growth rate declines. So we won’t be on a never ending treadmill.

Electricity-GDP

Is a carbon tax feasible, and is it desirable?

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Stephen Cohen posted on the Energy Collective about whether a carbon tax is political feasible in the current environment. He argues that Republicans are likely to block any such attempt, and instead proponents should focus on efforts to reduce the costs of renewables and non-fossil alternatives. He’s particularly interested in the problem of making the purchase of renewable energy in all forms accessible to lower income groups. He proposes that R&D efforts be increased to achieve that goal.

I see two problems with this approach. First is that it’s not clear the achieving increased R&D investment is any more feasible given likely GOP resistance. Even if the solar R&D investment program was successful on net, the prominence of the Solyndra failure stands in the way.

The second is that failing to internalize the social cost of carbon emissions can lead to future distortions. The biggest problem is not so much the subsidies themselves, which may be justified on a short run basis to spark a market, but rather the difficulty of ending them when they are no longer needed. In one example, California’s Central Valley Project provided subsidized water to farmers with contracts with 40 year terms. The original subsidies were supposed to expire at the point, but the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act provided for renewal of those contracts on similar terms, which was actually expected by farmers for many years prior. Those subsidies were capitalized into land prices and eventually captured by the landowners resulting in a large wealth transfer from tax payers. While the “average” price of water now likely reflects the opportunity cost of water, the marginal price of that water is still below the actual true cost, and farmers still don’t have as strong of an efficiency signal as they should. (In contrast, State Water Project and groundwater pumping costs have little or no real subsidies.) This illustrates how a subsidy has long outlived it’s usefulness and the extreme difficultly in ending them when a political constituency is created.

As a counter point, Martin Weitzman proposes that a carbon tax be created essentially through the backdoor of tariff negotiations. Weitzman points out the difficulty of negotiating quantity targets through such instruments such as the Kyoto Protocol. In contrast, successful tariff negotiations are the norm in the World Trade Organization. The President conducts those negotiations with relatively more independence, even as the current controversy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership has highlighted the exceptions to the rule. That implies that a carbon tariff probably can make it deeper into the federal legislative process than a straight up carbon tax, and the probability of a successful outcome increases significantly.

Legal Planet: California Supreme Court to review San Diego SB 375 climate change ruling

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I blogged earlier on the implications of this case. The UCLA/Boalt Law Schools blog Legal Planet has more on this review.

Focus on uncertainty and risk in climate change

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Unfortunately Alex Epstein, a blogger at Forbes, takes the wrong perspective–an underlying premise that we need absolute certainty that climate change is occurring before we should act. (And equally unfortunately, environmentalist argue that catastrophic climate change is occurring with absolute certainty to defend policy initiatives.)

The correct perspective is to ask “what are the relative risks and consequences posed by potential climate change?” Can we say with absolute certainty that GCC is not and will not occur? No, we have strong evidence that warming has occurred (although the rate can be disputed) and that various local climates have measurably changed (e.g., glaciers receding). As an analogy, would anyone argue that we shouldn’t take measures to reduce forest fire risks to communities even if fires aren’t burning nearby? We know that such fires are a strong risk, and we ask what actions are sufficient to reduce the risks while still achieving other objectives. We should be asking the same questions regarding responses to potential climate change.

Steve Moss and I wrote about this perspective in 1999 in Chapter 2 of this report. (Note that we did not coauthor the other chapters. Chapter 3 about the economic consequences of using carbon taxes to replace other tax revenues in particular is simply wrong.) Economists have evolved methodologies beyond the simple approach we presented there, such as robust decision making (RDM), real options analysis and “fat-tailed” uncertainty benefit-cost analysis. We face a great deal of uncertainty in many dimensions. We need to conduct more complete analyses that assess the potential costs and benefits under uncertainty–i.e., measure the risk of relative actions and non actions.

Simply having a battle over which scientists are correct is fruitless and distracts us from the real question at hand. Let’s agree that a large plurality of scientists have posed a plausible case for human-induced climate change, even if there are doubts about the potential magnitude and consequences. Then we can move on to what are the range of potential consequences and the justification for various responses.

SANDAG, Executive Orders and California Policies

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In a rather earthshaking ruling, California’s Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) must comply with the Governor Schwarzenegger’s Executive Order S-3-05 to “by 2050, reduce GHG emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels.” SANDAG had completed its 2050 Regional Transportation Plan using AB 32 as its primary compliance hurdle. AB 32 “requires California to reduce its GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.” SB 375 required that metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) such as SANDAG develop sustainable community strategies (SCS) that reduce GHG emissions by an amount allocated by the California Air Resources Board to each MPO.  SANDAG’s RTP is its SCS.

This is the first time that an EO has been held at legally binding on local agency actions. Governors have issued plenty of EOs before but they’ve been taken as providing policymaking and rulemaking guidance to the Governor’s appointees in various agencies. This decision raises the question whether those other EOs will now carry much more weight? And if governors issue conflicting EOs, which one is currently in force? What if an EO conflicts with state law passed by the Legislature?

On climate change, governors have issued seven such EOs. The Governor recently issued an EO calling for substantial water use reductions in the drought. Is the EO from 2008 still in force?  The Energy Action Plan EO from 2004 calls for several specific actions by state agencies, many of them undertaken but necessarily on the timeline specified. Should the 33% renewable portfolio standard (RPS) be implemented along the lines of state law or the EO? A bit of research could show many more of these types of examples.

SANDAG is appealing the decision the State Supreme Court. How various interests align will be interesting.

RFF: Seminar 12/3/14 on China’s cap & trade pilot programs

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I had not realized that China has been running 3 pilot cap & trade projects. Resources for the Future is hosting a seminar/webinar December 3 exploring China’s efforts:

http://www.rff.org/Events/Pages/Carbon-Cap-and-Trade-in-China.aspx

Looking at a locality’s options as the energy marketplace changes

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Here’s the first in a series of articles that I am coauthoring about how the new direction in the energy utilities marketplace can affect the choices for a locality like the City of Davis. This one is with Gerry Braun. This first article reviews the findings of study conducted last year that focused on a more traditional utility models, and then sketches the most salient options. This and future articles with other co authors will include:

  • What are the options going forward for Davis and what have we looked at.
  • Describing decentralized energy systems
  • How a decentralized energy system might fit into achieving local goals (e.g., climate action plan) and affect economic activity.
  • Barriers to achieving local goals in this future scenario.
  • Comparisons of potential business models to overcome those barriers.